Knight of Cups (Knights of the Tarot #2)

Chapter 1

With a heaviness in my heart I had not known since I watched my father die on the gallows, I pulled my plaid tighter around my shoulders. The bitter north wind blowing across the desolate heath burned my face and cut like a knife through my ice-encrusted tartan garments. Drumossie Moor had to be the worst possible place to challenge the Duke of Cumberland's army.

What were our chances of winning this battle? Somewhere between slim and none, I would wager. The luck we enjoyed at Gladsmuir and Falkirk, it would seem, had finally run out.

The English enemy had canons, rifle-muskets affixed with bayonets, ammunition, horses, archers, and some nine thousand well-rested, well-fed soldiers trained and drilled for just this sort of line-to-line confrontation.

We Jacobites, in contrast, were a rag-tag bunch of frozen, starved, and exhausted volunteers. If the duke's army stood firm in the face of our charge, we were doomed. Not that we stood much chance either way.

Even so, my father would have wanted me to fight for the rightful king and the One True Faith. Was he looking down from Heaven right now? Was he proud of his only son for taking up the cause for which he gave his life?

A braw man with a passionate heart, he was hanged, drawn, and quartered twenty-three years ago—when I was on the cusp of manhood—for his role in the Atterbury Plot, a Jacobite conspiracy to restore the House of Stuart to the throne of Great Britain.

His head, which I stole from its place of display atop Temple Bar, the ceremonial archway between London and Westminster, was buried in the walled garden of my castle, beside my gold, to prevent my most prized family treasures from falling into thieving Sassenach hands. I might not love the Stuarts as much as did my father, but I hate the heretic English even more.

If only I could have hidden my wife and unborn child from the enemy as easily.

Please, Father in Heaven, keep them safe.

Biting down to still my chattering teeth, I urged my mount onto the sodden field where the prince was doing his best to bolster morale. Some poor sods dozed where they stood; others lay along the road like plaid-shrouded corpses awaiting the death cart. Still more had abandoned their posts altogether—out of futility and hunger.

Our best fighters had yet to show up and the promised reinforcements from France were naught but a pipe dream, regrettably.

From the look of things, we were about to be handed our bollocks.

Feeling as if I were being forced to dig my own grave, I reined my horse into position beside the other mounted officers. The sun was at high noon now and the lines were drawn within cannon-shot of one another. Despite our dismal prospects, the clansmen took off their bonnets and gave a great whooping cheer. The enemy answered with a resounding huzzah.

Cannons boomed, one after the other, and I remembered those nights in my youth when I believed the thunder was God expressing his wrath for the sins I was too ashamed to confess. Fornication, impure thoughts, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, self-pleasuring, and covetousness, among them. I was far from an evil man, but neither was I a monk.

Heracles danced under me, champing at the bit to have his head. I kept the horse reined in and an eye out for the order to engage.

When it came, the front line charged, swords drawn, guns blazing. The English showered them with grapeshot and bullets. The sulphuric smoke of gunpowder clouded the air. Lord Murray's regiment swung off to the right, leaving the MacDonalds wide open.